Remember Kathy Hochul?

Democrats should have spent the last three weeks celebrating Rep. Kathy Hochul’s victory as a model of a Medicare-messaged blueprint for their electoral aspirations next fall.

Instead, the limelight was sucked into the imploding supernova of Anthony Weiner, and Hochul slipped quietly into office, acquiring a suite of offices that belonged to her predecessor Chris Lee, another New York member who resigned in disgrace in another sex scandal earlier this year.

Story Continued Below

So Hochul is settling in like any other anonymous freshmen in the minority — insisting she doesn’t see herself as the template for Democratic ambitions.

“I didn’t come here to be celebrated or come in as a conquering hero,” she said in an interview in her office this week. “That’s not my style at all.”

In her first three weeks in office, Hochul has dug in on policy—cosponsoring two bills with New York Democrat Brian Higgins to streamline the passport acquirement process, introducing a motion on the House floor to restore Republican cuts to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and meeting with the president to talk the economy and job creation.

She hasn’t hung anything on the walls yet. A few magazines and a rubber ball band sit on the shelves in her reception area, and she keeps a basket of sunflowers on the desk in her office—a minimalism reflective of an aggressively low key demeanor for a member whose election was the subject of such intense analysis.

Hochul says she’s looking for areas to reduce the deficit—an oft-repeated refrain as she campaigned in the diners around her Republican leaning district, including ways to bring down the cost of prescription drugs for Medicare recipients and cuts to the defense budget. She’s also open to spending reductions for Medicaid, though not in the form of block grants offered to states, as proposed in the GOP budget blueprint.

The CFTC was not one of the agencies she was willing to cut. Hochul stood on the floor last week attempting to restore the 30 million Republicans cut from the commission, arguing that Congress shouldn’t cut the agency in charge of policing oil market speculation while gas prices were so high. The motion failed but received the support of all of her Democratic colleagues and one Republican, Walter Jones of North Carolina.

On June 2nd, after Congressional Democrats met with President Obama, Hochul stayed behind for a private meeting with the president in the Oval Office on the lessons of her campaign. Hochul’s spoke to the president about “protecting small businesses,” reducing what she called their “tax burden” and ending tax breaks for oil companies.

“I’m very, very cognizant of the people who sent me here and what my responsibilities are. Everything else is a sideshow to me,” Hochul said in an interview in her office this week. “To the extent that people believe that Democrats are right on the issues as a result of my race, that is the proper takeaway. I think winning in a Republican district on those issues should be a lesson to everyone else that this is what the voters wanted, at least at this snapshot in time.”

Hochul shares a condominium with two Democratic freshmen, Reps. Terri Sewell of Alabama and Frederica Wilson of Florida in Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s (D-N.Y.) Capitol Hill town house. At home in the district, she bikes and takes walks with her husband, who’s helping her train to be a part of the Congressional women’s softball team, which plays Thursday night.

On Father’s Day she went to a Batavia Muckdogs game in her district and asked the players for pointers. “I don’t want to throw like a girl,” she says.

Corrected: Republican Walter Jones is from North Carolina. This was incorrect in the original version of this story.